what does this mean? it means that for example in the case of LEB, she posted an average of 10.5 times each and every day from the day of her first post to the day her avatar was deactivated.

why top13? itís a nice round number and it just happened to be all of the posters that i found who averaged more than 6 posts per day while they have been or were still active. [i limited this search to the top 40 or so most prolific posters - if youíre interested in where this original list came from continue reading the post following this one]

why am i posting this list? rather than give an immediate answer iíll jump to the following modest, but likely controversial, proposal:

would supertopo benefit from a per user daily post limit?

[what this exact number would be, is debatable. but for the sake of this argument say a maximum of somewhere between 7 and 12 posts per user per day. this would also have to include deletions.]

before you dismiss this suggestion, as just the latest attempt to place unnecessary structure on supertopo, consider the following positives:

1. it would encourage people to create higher quality and more considered posts.2. it would encourage people to focus their posts on threads where they had the most to contribute to.3. small groups of people who wanted to argue [or in general have more personal communications] would have motivation to do so via personal messaging and email.4. most importantly it would significantly reduce a single users ability to monopolize an individual thread.

as far as downsides, frankly iím not really seeing any [as long as the number was not so low that it was cramping a lot of positive users style Ė how low was too low would therefore be a very important question]. there are very few potential downsides because ultimately this type of rule would effect very, very, very few contributors.

iím with the apparent majority here and think a large part of what makes this board click is itís anarchic simplicity. still, the more i look at these numbers and a lot of what has wasted both the supertopo ďeditorsĒ time and those trying to pick through individual threads time, the more sense this proposal makes to me.

the point of this isnít to suggest that everyone on the list or everyone who posts many times a day, everyday, is a ďbadĒ poster. to be clear, imo there is not a single person on that list who has not at times been a positive contributor to supertopo. a few are even among those, who i consider to be, the most consistently worthwhile contributors.

rather, the point is that maybe this board would benefit from a structure that bolstered the proposition that a large part of what makes this information source so compelling is the incredible range and depth of the individual voices contributing.

when supertopo was just starting out and had 100ís or even just 1000ís of contributors, the ability for an individual avatar to create posts without restraint would have been a positive and likely even crucial contributor to this boards ability to survive. otoh, at this point in the boards history i would suggest the ability a single user has to monopolize a thread that hundreds, or even thousands of other individual users have contributed to is the single biggest roadblock holding this board back from being an even more compelling information source than it already is. the only reason i can see for not considering a post limit is an attachment to a wild west supertopo era when there were relatively few users moseying about on the virtual plain. for better or worse the virtual campfire is no longer as small as it once was.

so, what say you? am i missing something?

if you agree that a limit would be a good idea, what would be a good limit?

and if these numbers suggest something else or nothing at all to you, i hope youíll post that up as wellÖ

if you like numbers continue on to the next post and a further explanation of how i stumbled across this idea. otherwise iím hoping the hounds, for better or worse, will be released on this idea Ö

tl;dr: Do you think it would be a good idea for Supertopo to have a maximum number of posts that any single avatar can contribute per day?

Based on the above the most prolific posters accounted for the following percentages of the total 1944516 posts [as of Feb. 5, 2013]:

top poster: 1.9% of all posts or 1/ every 53 posts
top 3 posters: 5.1% of all posts or 1/ every 20 posts
top 10 posters: 12.7% of all posts or 1/ every 8 posts
top 20 posters: 19.6% of all posts or 1/ every 5 posts

this is the top 20ish and not the top 20 because itís based solely on my best guesses as to who the most prolific posters are. i checked the profiles of about 40 of the users i recollect seeing here the most often and of those that i checked, these were the top 20. there are likely users that i have forgotten or who were prolific before i started lurking and then posting here. that said, iím betting i likely have a majority of the top posters. and while it might change the names and bump the percentages up a little bit i doubt it would make a drastic difference to the post percentages that the top 1,3,10, and 20 posters are responsible for. [if youíve got a higher total than this and want to take your place among the most fecund, post up and iíll make a correction.]

so why did i do this? this started with my thinking about the analysis aaron swartz did regarding wikipedia a few years back. he found that while the analysis wikipedia founder jimmy wales had done, that found about 0.7% of users were responsible for 50% of the edits, was correct, it was actually more complex than that. while it was true that the bulk of the edits were done by the same people, when one took into account who had changed the most letters it actually showed a more diverse range of significant contributors. in short it showed that the major contributors to each individual article were quite varied and that those contributions were then minorly edited for grammar/spelling/etc numerous times by the same core group of people.

while thinking about this i became curious what a similar set of statistics would look like for supertopo.

so to continue, according to urlpulse supertopo has had an average of about 3000 individual users per day and according to quantcast supertopo has had an average of about 15000 individual users every month for the last 6 months.

now this is where it gets significantly handwavey again. given that these stats donít go very far back and are not based on direct measurement i have to make a bit of a wild guess as to what the average monthly usership over the lifetime of supertopo has been. while this is really only good to an order of magnitude my guess is that it would probably drop to at most an average of about 4000 unique users [not necessarily contributors] per month as an average during the 10 or so years that supertopo has been around.

using this provisional guess 20/4000 or 0.5% of monthly users are responsible for 19.6% of the posts. these 20 users would therefore be about 400 times more prolific than the average user.

does this tell us anything we wouldnít have expected from the outset? from what i see, not really: a relatively small minority of the posters are responsible for a large majority of the contributions. this is just as one would expect and is, also likely, necessary for the survival of a compelling board.

if a person wanted to prove the above point theyíd have to continue on with an analysis of individual threads looking to see who was actually contributing the bulk of the original material. iíve seen enough for the time being that i suspect my initial suspicions are correct [and iíve also spent too much time looking at all of this, already. haha.]

my assumption is that like wikipedia, supertopo benefits from an interplay between two overlapping groups of users:1. a core group of users who generally make small but frequent comments on a large number of threads.2. a wide range of users who draw on a breadth of expertise to make relatively infrequent but often more in depth contributions to the campfire.

iím arguing that a somewhat balanced interplay between frequent/core and infrequent/breadth contributor is what drives the vitality of this board.

but, the reason i decided to type all of this up is due to what happened next. while all of the above was relatively expected, what i did find suggestive was when i then went and looked at when people started posting [and if they have been deactivated when they stopped posting] and did a calculation of the average daily number of posts that the top 20 posted [+ a handful of those i suspected of high post rates]. what resulted is what i documented in the post previous to this one.

and to recap the point of that post what iím arguing is that the point where the anarachy of supertopo falls apart is when an individual user monopolizes what has become an oftentimes profound and/or entertaining board.

[if you made it this far, thanks for taking time to read all of this Ö iím almost done Ö look down Ö youíve almost made it Ö]

finally, there are going to be those of you who have no interest in any changes to the st board. for you i have brought rogers pass ski touring photos as penance for all of the preceding text and its obnoxious lack of caps. haha.:

In my view, you have not established that there is a problem with some people "posting too much".
I haven't seen any examples of a person "monopolizing" a topic, although I do not look at political threads.

A posts per day limit would be bad if it limited contributions from those who make many informative posts, such as WBraun.

Your statistics are not appropriate to a "posts per day" limit, because they average across many days where the person probably had zero posts. You could try recomputing average posts per day using days with nonzero posts.

Over 800 posts Ed was running at an average of a little over 5 per day, though he did reach 10.

Over 800 posts you(JE) averaged 3.4 per day.

On the one hand running unobstructed in real time on the net feels very freeing. But this is not natural. In an real conversation you can't actually do this, unless you are willing to interrupt the speaker. As you know and Ed demonstrates it generally takes time to marshal facts for a post.

If we get away from the free-for-all melee approach a little, might we encourage more of this?

Edit:
Divided by the number of days between today and the date of the 800th post back.

By the way I have long made a practice of using edits for responses so that my post is not in effect "bumped".

It seems to me that the megaposters make a big contribution to creating a sense that the Forum is a community. If you were walking around a town and everyone was a stranger, you'd feel like you were a stranger. But if you were walking around and here and there you recognized a few faces, you'd feel more like you belonged. I've said "Happy Birthday" to a few of those people, whom I've never met, because they became recognizable to me in a positive way by virtue of their megaposting.

hey there, all,say.... dial up stalled, :( :( :(
could NOT do the edit:

i just learned there is a roger's pass in MONTANA, NOW, too...

oh my..... :O
i'm learning, double-time, now...
sorry, will edit and fix, that there are TWO roger's passes,
that i learned of... don't want to spread bad rumors, ;)
LATER....

edit:

Origin of Name

Rogers Pass in Montana was named by the Great Northern Railroad for one of the line's locating surveyors,[4] A.B. Rogers, who located the pass in 1887. Rogers has the distinction of having two passes named after him, this one in Montana, and another Rogers Pass in British Columbia Canada.[5] In 1881 and 1882 A.B. Rogers was a surveyor for the Canadian Pacific Railway, and he located Rogers Pass in British Columbia, Canada, which was then used by the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) on its transcontinental line across Canada. The CPR named the pass after Rogers. James Jerome Hill, who controlled both the CPR and the Great Northern then hired Rogers as a locating engineer on his Great Northern Railroad which built into Montana in 1887. Shortly after Rogers had located the pass in Montana that bears his name, his career ended when he was badly injured falling from his horse.[6] Although Hill and the Great Northern Railroad eventually chose Marias pass, 100 miles to the north, as the pass over the continental divide for their transcontinental railroad route, Hill saw to it that Rogers Pass in Montana was named after the surveyor.

neebee, Roger's Pass British Columbia is to backcountry skiers as Mecca is to Muslims and Rome is to Catholics. A place of great wild beauty, spirit and soul. I can only hope to return again and again for the rest of my days.

as i've continued to think about the original premise i've realized that it likely wouldn't make a significant difference to board composition whether or not a rule, as suggested, was formally introduced.

that's because for all intents and purposes the rule is already in place.

when you look at a list of the deactivated it becomes apparent that, unconsciously at least, underlying much of cmac's judicious use of his imperial prerogative is the following:

long term poster + extremely high post per day rate + primarily OT posting = supertopo swimming with the fishes.

if you americans ever get civilian oversight for your president's drone strike program i would seriously suggest you nominate cmac.

and if you don't get that oversight i'll be the first to suggest MacNamara/locker for president 2028! [every obama needs a biden :-p]

while this board isn't purely anarchic nor self-governing it is a benevolent dictatorship led by a leader with a truly deft hand.

current data on gross post rate to STForum is something like 853 post per day over about a year of data collecting (ok, 445.45625 days) there are rather large fluctuations around that, but the long time trends smooth out.

the recent rate has the 2 million post mark happening around 4/16/2013